Getting the most out of Resort Hotel > Putting it all together.

As mentioned in earlier topics, Resort Hotel is all about helping you to make more profit from your foodservice business. An important aspect of this is the flexibility the program gives you to review your costing and sales information to make informed decisions when running your business.

All the data entry and updating effort is to:-

•Check/review individual recipe (product) costs on a daily/weekly basis.

•Check/review stock purchase values and compare them to the previous period.

•Check/review end of period stock levels and compare them to the previous period.

•Generate a Cost of Goods Sold report at the end of a trading period to see how your overall operation is running.

Here are a few 'operational' hints on using Resort Hotel.

•Update your ingredient costs regularly. We recommend at least once per fortnight, but some items may need updating weekly. For instance, seafood prices can move quite a lot in the matter of a few days, and you don't want to be caught out using a (newly) expensive seafood item on your menu and possibly losing money because of it. It's always better to know about these things before they become a problem. Updating these costs doesn't take long but it's time well spent.

•Set up your menus and run budget menu engineering calculations before implementing the menus. It's amazing how much information you can glean from running budget menu engineering for a new menu. Wouldn't it be better to know about poorly performing menu items before you 'go live' with a new menu?

•Enter actual sales figures into your menus and review the engineering results. We recommend doing this fortnightly or monthly. Combine regular ingredient price updates with menu engineering review, and remove all the nasty surprises and prevent loss making products before they become real problems.

You might see a bit of a trend in the hints above. Resort Hotel lets you keep control of your costings and make decisions about poorly performing products before they become a real problem.